An essential reference for making spring flowers. This booklet covers Martineau's method of making a large bouquet (complete with long stems) of spring flowers, but this book would also be enormously useful to anyone wanting to make individual spring flowers for the traditional Flowers from Paper Cone production. Martineau gives you precise instructions, with very clear illustrations, on how to make the flowers. If you know Martineau's illustrations from the Rice Encyclopedia of Silk Magic then you will know how precise his drawings are.
Spring Flowers have really become a do-it-yourself project for anyone who wants decent-looking blooms that halfway resemble real flowers (from a distance). These are not difficult to make once you understand the proportions and the steps for constructing them, but they are very time consuming to produce (and to make a decent looking production you need at least 50) so the days of purchasing good looking pre-made spring flowers from a magic dealer have passed. You'll have to rely on your own craftiness and the investment of your own time. Almost all of the pre-made spring flowers you can obtain from a magic supplier these days are made cheaply in India and they don't look very good, most don't even attempt to look like real flowers (the worst offenders being the "flowers" that are made from metallic-looking mylar. What those are intended to resemble I have no idea, but they sure don't look like flowers.) By combining the construction techniques that Martineau covers (either for individual blooms or a whole bouquet with long stems) along with adding some tasteful stippling on the inner part of the flowers and stippling along the outer edges of the flowers using colored Sharpie markers, or PrismaColor or Copic Markers, you can increase the resemblance of the blooms to real flowers (you can also brush on colored dye with a slightly wet watercolor brush on the edges of the blooms which can yield some interesting color bleed gradients --- experiment!) Another good option is to obtain some of the artificial flowers made from thin fabric at a craft store and use those to construct your spring flowers, instead of using the traditional tissue paper. The fabric flowers will tend to be a bit thicker than the paper flowers so that's something to consider in terms of the size of the load, but the fabric flowers (and green leaves) look realistic from a very short distance.
One bit of advice that is often forgotten when using spring flowers is the ratio of green leaves to colored blooms: it should be a ratio of 50 - 50, or some say 60 - 40 (that is for every 4 colored blossoms you would include 6 all green, or at least for every 5 colored blooms include 5 all green). Also, it tends to look better to have each bouquet or batch of spring flowers produced to be all one color, for example, all-white blooms, or all pink, or all red, all yellow, instead of mixing in multiple colors like red, yellow, purple, orange, blue, white, green. Or vary it by having mostly white blooms, but a few pink dropped in the mix. (again, keeping the proportion of all green leaves higher than the number of colored blooms)
If you want to see how good this can look search out a video of French magician Dani Lary performing his act "The Magical Gardener".
